The Midlands county of Nottinghamshire makes only infrequent appearances on the library shelves at LifeBook Memoirs, so it was a real and personal pleasure for me to edit Margot Griffiths\u2019 book, I Once Was a Rose<\/em>, which recounts a life spent in a Nottinghamshire village only a few miles from my own home. Many of the fields, rural lanes and city streets Margot travels in her story are familiar to me, but some disappeared many years ago \u2013 built upon, moved or altered beyond recognition \u2013 and now exist only in history, maybe even only in the pages of Margot\u2019s book. Learning of what had existed where new housing estates and warehouses now stand was enthralling.<\/p>\n Like Jane Austen, Margot paints her world with \u201ca fine brush\u201d. She describes \u2013 in loving, warm and often comic detail \u2013 her early childhood in Nottingham, the rural Nottinghamshire landscape where she has spent most of her life, her fifty-year marriage to her beloved husband, Alan, her three sons\u2019 lives, the companionship she has found in her later years with her partner, Ron, and the many animals who have coloured her days. With tales of being served a plate of earthworms by the little boy next door when she was five, escapades with naughty Tommy the pony and Donna the Great Dane and bike rides to work with Alan, she entices her readers into a rich and finely drawn story.<\/p>\n Margot\u2019s story begins in Nottingham before the start of the Second World War. She was, she says, a tomboy, wryly observing that this was what happened to a girl blessed with three brothers.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I didn\u2019t join in with them,\u201d she says, \u201cI\u2019d had it\u201d.<\/p>\n A beautiful doll\u2019s house complete with furniture, for example, she filled with white mice.<\/p>\n \u201cWonderfully,\u201d she says, \u201cI could watch them climbing over the furniture through all the windows\u201d.<\/p>\n There were, however, soon so many mice babies that her family insisted something had to be done. One by one, unbeknown to Margot\u2019s teachers, the mice \u2013 little fluffy contraband bundles in shoe boxes \u2013 were taken to school and distributed among her friends.<\/p>\n Margot\u2019s childhood was not a cosseted one. Upon hearing tales of her latest explorations of the Nottinghamshire countryside, her mother was wont to say, \u201cWell, as long as you\u2019re not falling in any ponds or anything \u2026\u201d Margot also had many adventures with her beloved pony, Tommy, including riding on the beaches of the Lincolnshire coast, inviting boys from the nearby borstal to a family Bonfire Night party without thinking to ask her parents first and an enjoyably farcical episode in which she and Tommy were abandoned on a railway siding in a horsebox.<\/p>\n Animals \u2013 horses, dogs, cats, hens, bees \u2013 continued to play a rich part in Margot\u2019s life as she grew into adulthood. As well as running boarding kennels, she worked as a laboratory assistant in veterinary research, where some of her daily duties in the parasitology department are not suitable for repeating here.<\/p>\n Margot and Alan were, she says, chalk and cheese, but their long marriage was the happiest imaginable. They met when Alan, a biologist, started working in the same virology department as Margot, and love quietly and steadily blossomed between them. They married and took their honeymoon in the family caravan on the Lincolnshire coast, accompanied by Margot\u2019s Great Dane, Donna. The presence of such a large dog in a caravan ensured that romance was perhaps less romantic than Margot and Alan might have hoped.<\/p>\n Three sons and many years of happiness followed in the small Nottinghamshire village where Margot has lived since she was ten years old. Her home is a place of \u201ctreasured memories\u201d and \u201cshared fulfilment, love, hard work and even sadness\u201d, all of which she describes with detailed affection. She and Alan were deeply immersed in activities in the village, enjoying dances at the village hall, the bowls club, the local horticultural show, the Parish Council and lots of fetes and festivals. As her sons, of whom she is immensely proud, grew up, Margot took on a variety of roles, including psychiatric nursing, running a playgroup and a Brownie pack in the village and, in later years, caring for her elderly mother and a frail family friend in her home.<\/p>\n Margot\u2019s story, by turns funny and touching, is modest and unassuming. Perhaps more than this, though, it is the story of how kindness and love bring happiness and contentment. As she brings her autobiography to a close, she wishes, on reflection, that she had taken more care to avert some of her many riding injuries, but other than that, she has no regrets. She would not change a thing.<\/p>\n Written by Kate Parry, LifeBook Memoirs editor<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Uncover the quiet magic of a life well lived and full of laughter, love, animals and tales from rural Nottinghamshire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":16261,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"What\u2019s New in the Library? Margot Griffiths","_seopress_titles_desc":"Uncover the quiet magic of a life well lived and full of laughter, love, animals and tales from rural Nottinghamshire.","_seopress_robots_index":"","content-type":"","_metasync_otto_title":"","_metasync_otto_description":"","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"","_yoast_wpseo_title":"","_yoast_wpseo_metadesc":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[219,217],"tags":[114,118,124,127,120,131,122],"class_list":["post-16262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-leaving-a-legacy","category-private-autobiography","tag-family-history","tag-legacy","tag-life-story","tag-memoirs","tag-private-autobiography","tag-recollections","tag-storytelling"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Painting life with a fine brush<\/h2>\n
Loving, laughing and living<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n![\"LifeBook](\"https:\/\/www.lifebookmemoirs.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Kate-photo-243x300.jpg\")
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